Ken Jennings: Watson, Jeopardy and me, the obsolete know-it-all

Watson is a AI computer powered by IBM POWER7, a work-load optimized system that can answer questions posed in natural language over a nearly unlimited range of knowledge. Credit: IBM.

FILMED FEB 2013 • POSTED APR 2013 • TEDxSeattleU

TED presents Ken Jennings who has made a career as a keeper of facts; he holds the longest winning streak in history on the U.S. game show Jeopardy. But in 2011, he played a challenge match against supercomputer Watson — and lost. With humor and humility, Jennings tells us how it felt to have a computer literally beat him at his own game, and also makes the case for good old-fashioned human knowledge.

Watson can process 500 gigabytes, the equivalent of a million books, per second. With its 80 TeraFLOPs it would have been placed 94th on the Top 500 Supercomputers list, in 2012. The content was stored in Watson’s RAM for the game because data stored on hard drives are too slow to access.